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Sahar Sarid is one of the most active voices in the Domain industry and a leading domain investor. Recently, he launched a contest to determine the best features needed for domainers, to be incorporated in the recently launched DNZoom service. As a domain investor, I’d like to jump in with a few suggestions of what I believe is needed to improve the domain investment market:

These suggestions are in no particular order:

1. Have active offers with expiration dates or without expiring. I have seen way too often in the domain forums how sellers of the domain claim that they once received a “$x,xxx” offer for the domain once. Well, make this process transparent. I want to buy xyz.com, I give them a $xx,xxx offer that will expire in 2 months. I give them a $xx,xxx minus $x,xxx offer that will never expire. This offer is visible – it is active. Other buyers can see the active offers on the domain. The seller can choose to execute the sale based on these active offers any time they want.

This adds value to the market by establishing floors on demand for domains. This further increases the amount of data available for calculating the value of comparable domains. Active offers by reputable buyers could even serve as collateral for the owner of the domain to take out a loan.

2. Expiration dates for domains should be active. By this, I mean that there should be buttons for me to click on and have it add the date to my calendar. Palm, Google, Outlook. This way, as I search for domain names, I can click on this active link and instantly integrate it into my calendar system which will remind me when that domain is going to expire.

Furthermore, you could have a paid service of receiving an SMS alert when a domain is close to or has expired.

3. Group data on an industry and provide a perspective to domainers on how well they are performing on their monetization. (OK this is a bit hard to do) But imagine if I was in the “travel” industry. How are my travel domains performing relative to the entire pool of travel related domain names? Which parking service is performing best for that industry. Perhaps lead generation by xyz parking company is proving to be more lucrative in this industry. Perhaps it is Cost Per Click by abc company.

4. On that same note, let domain holders know when specific industry domains are being sold. If I have a strong portfolio on “car” domains, it is more likely that I will pay a premium for a domain related to “cars”, because among other reasons, I have a multiplier effect in income when I hold many domains from one industry. So, identify or ask domain holders which industries they are interested in, and notify them when a domain has been put on sale or expiring auction.

5. Transparency on traffic and revenues! Offer the option to share certified income reports and/or traffic with prospective buyers, or simply to share it in a public space. If publicly shared, then integrate it into the whole search experience. This way, people can search the whois and see the field for traffic and revenue of that domain. Or search by traffic and/or revenue. Buyers can then make their offers in the style of Suggestion #1.

6. Open is the new black! Once you have gathered enough data, put it out to the world in the form of APIs. This will make the industry stronger, unleashing valuable data for bright minds that want to build applications we haven’t even imagined.

I hope many of you choose to participate in this contest and make this industry better.

This is an idea that just occurred to me on dealing with Spam from a large email provider, such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail or Hotmail. Back in 2005, I had written a post on how effective Gmail had become on spam and how they could use that understanding to offer an attractive option to domain owners to have mail on their domain (which as we know now is a Google offering).

Currently, Google’s Gmail is ideally positioned to benefit from a largely ignored market of e-mail outsourcing. To that effect, the implementation of effective spamming tools, together with Gmail’s clean and organized web-format would benefit many individuals. More importantly it would benefit businesses, both large and small, for which Gmail could handle all of their e-mail traffic, hosting and storage needs.
The question then becomes how to extract the maximum value out of move to significantly reduce spam? To maintain Gmail’s current business model and improve their companies image Google should still maintain their free individual email accounts. However, to address the business communities’ needs for an efficient anti-spamming email service, Google could offer a subscription email solution.
Technically this would involve Google setting up private label paid accounts where companies and individuals could set Google as their mail server and view their e-mails in a Gmail’s online interface or through the clients PC based email programs; such as, Eudora and Outlook. (read more)

Despite advancement in this field, spam reaching our Inbox is still much higher than desired. Following on that note, I believe that an effective spam blocking tool could actually be your users. In a large enough pool, employing your users in a style similar to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, spam filtering could actually make your spam machine more precise in reducing spam. Here’s how I envision it:

Identify the spam reporting activity of your user base

Separate the x% of most active spam reporters within your user base

Analyze your active spam reporting group’s precision in actually reporting general spam, rather than personal specific mail which they report as spam incorrectly and filter out those who use the spam reporting tool incorrectly.

Now you should have a clean spam reporting pool (SRP) of users at a 9x% confidence level

Plug in those users who you identify from the SRP to be online, into your spam filter engine so that emails with a high spam score that are not high enough to be discarded in the automated process are first sent out to your online users in the SRP.

You should then receive a percentage response of Spam from these users that would tip over that email message into the Spam pool, before it is sent out to the general population.

This method can be most effective from a large user pool like that of Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo Mail, because many Spam efforts are directed to the email provider domain (gmail.com, hotmail.com). Gmail is in an even more advantageous position, given their management of Gmail for your domain, which could serve as an extra window on spammers focusing in a more heterogeneous domain attack.

For the past several months, I have been watching and considering an investment in CNET Networks, precisely because of its attractiveness of individual assets, which if spun off could suggest a much higher total worth than the current $1.3 billion. However, upon closer inspection of the individual parts, I am still not convinced that the sum of its parts, under current conditions, is worth more than its 1.3 billion. CNET is currently carrying too much fat and producing mediocre returns on their prime jewels. Take for instance News.com, which as suggested by the NY Times produced in October a mere 6 million page views, compared to 8 million page views produced by a small group of bloggers with minimal costs over at TechCrunch.

The key of course, is finding buyers for CNET’s crown jewels, which are:

TV.com – This is currently a site which alone could be worth more than CNET’s current market cap, but the focus of the site is its main problem. TV.com is aimed at providing a TV guide resource – big mistake!

Instead, TV.com could become the place to go for TV watching, think YouTube or Hulu. Capitalize on the millions of confused visitors coming in from the highly marketed .TV extension. Strike deals with media companies to stream television through TV.com. Stream everything under the sun! Sell the idea to Mark Cuban, sell it to Murdoch. Try to get a link from future generation television sets that are integrated with wireless internet, so that TV.com is the link to online television. How many people are looking to buy a TV and just type TV.com? Have a section in the site for TV purchases, cable subscription services.

The current site is probably 10 to 15% of the traffic and revenues it could achieve.

News.com – When you type News.com, the first thing you see is technology news. Get over it. If I want technology news, I will type TechnologyNews.com, Technology.News.com, or TechCrunch.com. I don’t even want to know how many of CNET’s 2,600 employees it takes to run this charitable venture costing investors $16.65 million last quarter. Again, as TV.com, News.com is being used for less than 15% of its capacity.

When I type in News.com, it should be news about everything. I want to see videos of what’s happening around the world. I want to get international perspectives for what is happening in the war in Iraq. People should find ALL possible resources on news information and be able to interact and contribute. Oh so many possibilities!

Download.com is fairly well developed and should fetch a good price. I don’t have specifics on how much it costs them to offer what they claim to be a, “a rigorous testing process to ensure it is safe and spyware free”. Unless this rigorous testing process is subsidizing a considerable number of employees, an automated system should not represent a considerable cost. Advertising money here should be flowing comfortably in the black.

My current price $50 to 150 million.

Search.com – Wow, these people really knew how to pick their names. However, as Google becomes a household synonym for “search” I am less confident in this domain than what I would have been five years ago. I would assume that this is a rapidly depreciating asset and should have been shopped around much earlier. Sell it to Sahar Sarid for his search venture Assista. I am sure he’d appreciate the value it can bring to own the direct synonym to Google in his quest to take a bite of that space.

My current price $10 to 20 million (perhaps more depending on current traffic and revenue numbers)

Chat.com – Give me a break! This baby redirects to cnet.com? Yes, it should be a crime punishable to death. Chat.com has no home of its own. I’ve personally shopped around to buy chat ccTLDs and have already developed one into a chat site. These sites are great, because they are cheap to build and to maintain, and user loyalty is huge. Chat.com is a dream domain with immense potential. I want it.

Suggestions for this site are obvious – build chat channels and capitalize on the type-in traffic, which will serve as the commencement of an avalanche of visitors. These people spend 20, 40, 60 minutes straight in a page. Even at $2 CPMs, this is one site that could produce millions. Instead, old grandpa CNET reasons – if they type in chat.com it must be they want to read technology product reviews! Shame on you CNET.

My price $300k cash, right now! OK, seriously – $5 to 10 million – and the 10 is pushing it, because there’s no community. This is just a domain name purchase.

Future worth – $10 to 50 million easy.

Mp3.com – $5 million

GameSpot.com – $4 million

ZDNet.com – 3 million

TechRepublic.com – $2 million

mySimon.com – $1 million

UrbanBaby.com – $500k

Chow.com – $300k

As you can see from current conditions, a $1.3 billion market cap is reasonably priced. Yes, many of us see potential in a much higher worth, given the properties they own, but right now there is no bargain investment in CNET unless you have the power to enforce radical changes to current management or have faith in Jana’s capacity to push for that change.

To continue with the tradition of those who like to make predictions for the New Year, I have recovered an old crystal ball which has shown me the following Internet changes coming for the year 2008:

1. Big search engines will update their algorithm to favor country code top level domains (ccTLDs) in local search related queries.
2. As a result, in part, of number 1 prices and liquidity of ccTLDs will rise.
3. .mobi will continue to gain momentum, even though I have opposing feelings about this extension.
4. People will learn to understand the importance of IDNs and the value of these will rise – specifically for one word IDNs under the corresponding ccTLD or under the .com and .org.
5. Thousands of wannabe land rushers will flock to try and get a piece of China’s Internet population – and like in the West, most will fail.
6. General Internet users will be more knowledgeable of the Internet and search – reducing Type-in traffic for common words under the .com extension.
7. Many successful Internet ventures will start as tools built for users within Social networks, and no longer start from a single proprietary website.
8. A top Internet executive will be arrested.

Hey, don’t argue with me. This is what the crystal ball showed me, and it was very dusty.